Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is post web content on a regular basis to bring traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to ensure that new visitors will automatically start flowing when you publish content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are researching any advantage they can that can help you get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything is moving along in the gizmo assembly line when suddenly, things stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads straight towards the control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his utility belt and makes a very gentle tap about 1 inch from the top-left corner of the unit.
Immediately, every machine in the assembly line springs to life again.
The floor manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Why were they expected to pay so much for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your blog set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges is often ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, configuring some settings in your dashboard area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites.
External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it syndicates automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your configuration, content linking back to your site will be automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and site will be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some web properties and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your site:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, use your information to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, tracking code can be added to WordPress via plugins and automatically sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, use the details to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and pages set up with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are various sites and platforms you can add to your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify the update services list when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WP permalinks here: Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is safe from cyber-attacks.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bots and hackers.
Go here for more info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WP Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on the importance of having a compliant website here:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on links pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be presented with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to drive more traffic is post great content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes many website professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress website and proven web marketing strategies.
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